19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A visceral tale of poverty and determination, July 11, 2005
This review is from: Welfare Brat: A Memoir (Hardcover)
Intimate and powerful, Mary Childers' memoir of growing up in urban poverty in the 1960s Bronx leaves haunting images in its wake. Though arising from the usual sad litany of poverty - alcohol, drugs, unpredictable tempers, frightened children, abused women and dangerous streets - these images are singular, personal and painfully complex.
Like the time they had their roach-infested basement apartment painted, because a guy who owed the older sister's boyfriend a favor sent his crew over (this sister, Jackie, a high school drop-out, is already following in her mother's footsteps). Their mother, Sandy, exuberant at the prospect, drags the furniture away from the walls and urges the whole family to paint pictures of their own, whatever they want before the painters come to cover it up.
On the day itself, "no beer bottles in sight," Sandy takes them all to Coney Island, a trip which involves dragging cooler, stroller and duffle bag on two packed trains, where casual violence is always a danger. "Virtually every family on the train designates a hawk to detect the danger zones where action might flare....Everyone knows what happens if you interfere with teenage boys proving their manhood."
Though the lunch is only PB&J, "I'll be happy as long as Mom doesn't buy beer or, even worse, flirt one out of an innocent bystander." She doesn't and the day is idyllic. They take turns guarding the blanket. "I welcome my turn to guard our stuff. Reading on the beach without any of the kids bothering me is one of the most peaceful events of my life."
Sandy caps the day by taking the whole family on the roller coaster. Her glasses fly off in mid-whoop but her daughter Joan snags them in mid-air. Unfortunately a lurch slams her hand on the bar and a lens pops out. "Oh boy, wait until Mom sees this. She'll lose her temper. The day will be ruined....Mom believes Joan saved her glasses, and Joan and I dread admitting the truth. Joan squeezes back her tears as she rubs her hand with pain and worry." But the charmed day persists. Sandy's left eye is glass and it was the left lens that was lost.
Sandy is a mercurial figure who envelops her surviving seven children - six girls and one silent, outnumbered, beleaguered boy - with love, pelts them with curses, and leaves them hungry while she goes off partying. The atmosphere in their dank crowded apartment seesaws between giddiness and rage. And yet, suddenly, when one of the girls is hit by a car, Sandy promises God to quit drinking if the child survives - and does.
Not that her children trust the transformation. And the grinding cycle of poverty remains unbroken. Worn out by so many pregnancies and "bad habits" Sandy works even less, eking out their living on welfare alone and whatever her children contribute. While the fate of Mary's sisters remains precarious, her own determination is never in doubt.
"Most of the time I tell myself that my family feels like a lifeline, not a prison sentence, but I always have one eye on the door."
She is the one who insists on going to school, who braves any amount of resentment and ridicule to stay on the college-bound, escape-bound path. Taunted and persecuted by neighborhood kids as well as her mother, and even teachers sometimes for her welfare-brat clothing, Mary seldom wavers, as desperate as she is for friends and approval. An adrenaline-spiked stint with a neighborhood gang ends in shame when a boy's sneer jolts her back to herself. These kids are mean, racist bullies, she realizes. "I rolled in laughter when I should have been racked with guilt."
There are many threads that weave through Mary's story, but the cyclic, self-perpetuating nature of poverty is the strongest. There is one message children like her read loud and clear every day: "People who speak well and read widely may be admirable, but if you stand out, you'll be picked out. You're inviting trouble and loneliness when you distinguish yourself from your own by choosing to care about good grades, books, accents and magazine clothes.... Against my will, I've absorbed resentment and the nagging perception that my ambitions are disloyal, and worse, punishable."
Against the turmoil of the times: the assassinations, from JFK to MLK; the race riots and rampaging gangs; the fear of crime on the subway and on the street; the stigma and inadequacy of welfare, Mary keeps her eye on the prize - college. Escape. Her tumultuous, wrenching, sometimes funny story knocks home a serious lesson about the cycle of poverty. It takes more than brains, talent and hard work to escape the underclass. It takes steely determination, a tough shell and a willingness to go it alone.
- Portsmouth Herald
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Poverty is Hard Work, June 24, 2005
This review is from: Welfare Brat: A Memoir (Hardcover)
I am constantly amazed that people in our country continue to demonize the poor. Once again, a glorious book appears documenting the extraordinary lives of poor people. In this case, the classic welfare mother with her large, fatherless brood. This book, like The Color of Water - by James MacBride, Nickeled and Dimed - by Barbara Ehrenreich, and any number of Jonathon Kozel's books, indicate to me one clear message. You have to be extremely resourceful to survive poverty in this country. Even with the blessing of food stamps and welfare, it is still a miracle for someone in this situation to surface and take a breath each day.
I loved the characters in this book, warts and all. I imagined the actress from Malcolm In The Middle playing the role of the mother. She was an imperfect creature - flamboyant, tragic, and funny. I loved her because she never stopped struggling to hold her family together. Hit with the daily assaults only the poor understand, she stood up each day and took it on the chin.
This was actually fun to read. I constantly felt as if I were easedropping on a carefully kept diary of a girl as she grew to womanhood. Her feelings, her embarrassments, her dreads, all exposed like a pimple at a prom.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
I've never seen anything like it., October 12, 2005
This review is from: Welfare Brat: A Memoir (Hardcover)
Many people who overcome poverty are too ashamed to talk about it, or just want to leave it behind. They write autobiographies that gloss it over. Then there are those who milk it for undeserved rewards, romanticizing and embellishing a tough start, as in A Child Called It. Mary Childers seems to have written a completely different kind of book, in the hope that others will understand what it was like not just for her, but for any struggling welfare family.
There's nothing whiny or pleading about Childers' account of her youth, yet I squirmed with discomfort reading it. Too many children to feed and her mother produced another, with her teenaged daughter's boyfriend. Childers as a teenager watching someone else's baby so she could earn enough money for a root canal. Did people really live that way, in America, and recently? Her voice is compelling.
The reason for only 4 stars is the rushed ending. Childers writes, as an adult, of forgiving her mother and believing that she had tried as hard as she could to raise her children well. Bullbleep.
That part was not convincing at all--rather, it sounded like the stuff Childers was forced to say to get people to believe she was two years older in order to get a job. My opinion is that Childers wanted us to believe in her forgiveness just as she wanted people to think she was qualified for jobs she shouldn't have to hold.
And then, why was Mary so different from the rest of her family? In my experience, when a child escapes a bad family there is usually a "compassionate witness," one adult who believes in the child and helps that child to want more. There was no such person in the book, and it is hard to believe there was none in her life. Maybe there was more than one; in any case, no clear reason was given for why Mary Childers wanted to and was able to overcome her beginning.
Just the same, it was a riveting book, one that mostly made me cringe, sometimes made me smile, and always made me think.
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